This is my favorite piece I’ve written for them so far. The comments will undoubtedly be toxic, so I wouldn’t recommend reading them (I won’t be), but I’m pretty proud of the post, so I hope you check it out. Head over there, or you can read it cross-posted below the fold.
Terminating Women’s Rights
“For today, the women of this Nation still retain the liberty to control their destinies. But the signs are evident and very ominous, and a chill wind blows.”
Justice Harry Blackmun penned those words in the 1989 abortion-rights case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. Yesterday, his trepidations were validated. For American women, that chill wind has turned into a storm.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court of the United States narrowly upheld the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in a decision that has been hailed as giving anti-choice activists “the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.” While this is certainly an anti-choice victory, it isn’t a victory for “life,” for families, or for women.
What most anti-choice organizations won’t tell you is that the court’s upholding of the ban will probably not protect even one fetus. It will, however, give pregnant women fewer options, and potentially complicate their health (the ban does not include a health exemption). It interferes with the ability of doctors to choose the best treatment for their patients, and turns them into potential criminals. It limits the grieving options of women whose wanted pregnancies went wrong. And because it does not use medical terminology, opting instead to rely on anti-choice propaganda language coined in the mid-90s, it gives doctors limited information about what is actually outlawed.
What most anti-choice organizations also won’t tell you is that so-called “partial birth abortions” are often performed on women whose wanted pregnancies went tragically wrong. The image of the selfish woman, too lazy or irresponsible to end her pregnancy sooner, is what anti-choice activists would prefer we believed the women who have “partial-birth abortions” look like. In fact, the face of the outlawed procedure is more like this. And this. These are women with wanted pregnancies — women who may have bought a bassinet, picked out a name, decorated a nursery — when they receive the tragic news that they are carrying a fetus with abnormalities incompatible with life, or a fetus that is already dead or dying. These are also women who face serious health complications like preeclampsia, and women whose bodies and organs will be significantly weakened by birth, but won’t be killed — like the Polish woman who is nearly blind because she was refused access to abortion. Doctors — and indeed, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — say that the banned procedure is often the best choice for preserving the health of the pregnant woman. The court apparently disagrees, and thinks that Congress knows better than the doctors who actually treat pregnant patients.
Of course, Congress has already proven that it doesn’t know much, since many of the Act’s proclamations are factually incorrect, and, as Justice Ginsburg quoted in her dissent, “all of the government’s own witnesses disagreed with many of the specific congressional findings.” Even more telling is the fact that “partial-birth abortion” is not a medical term. It was coined by the anti-choice movement (literally by three anti-choice activists sitting in a room together and making up a term), and the procedure described in the Act most closely resembles what medical professionals call “dilation and extraction (D&X)” or “intact dilation and evacuation (intact D&E),” wherein a pregnant woman’s cervix is dilated, the fetus’s skull is collapsed, and the fetus is removed. Like most surgical procedures, the description is not pretty. But the key difference between the banned procedure and a similar, still legal procedure — dilation and evacuation — is that D&X allows the fetus to be removed in one piece, allowing grieving women to hold it and to say goodbye in their own way.
Dilation and extraction abortions are incredibly rare — they account for less than 1 percent of all abortions in the United States. The majority of abortions performed after 12 weeks fall into the “dilation and evacuation” category — but because the Act itself bans an ill-defined and highly politicized procedure, doctors worry that the broad language could encompass nearly all abortions after 12 weeks. The Court’s majority opinion, though, dismisses the void-for-vagueness complaints, and states that the Act only applies to D&X, and not D&E, procedures.
While that clarification is helpful, it does not change the fact that the language of the Act can still be interpreted otherwise, and may have a chilling effect on the already few and far between doctors who perform abortions after 12 weeks. And the language of the Court’s opinion is so paternalistic and condescending towards women (not to mention entirely dismissive of their physical health) that one can’t help but notice, as Justice Ginsberg did in her dissent, that the Court’s view of women “reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution ideas that have long since been discredited.”
In other words, this case is about more than just abortion — it’s about women’s very role in society, and our rights as autonomous human beings.
But perhaps the most important thing about this case is its total disregard for precedent, and its casual destruction of many of the baseline legal standards for abortion legislation. The requirement that anti-abortion laws offer a health exception for pregnant women has been a long-standing one; that is now obliterated. Since 1992, the “undue burden” standard has been the rule, with the Court dictating that the state can restrict abortion so long as the restriction does not place an “undue burden” on the pregnant woman (Planned Parenthood v. Casey). The lack of a health exception was, logically, considered an undue burden — after all, if disallowing a woman from terminating a pregnancy that threatens her health isn’t burdensome, then what is? Yesterday, the Court knocked this down, too. Finally, the Court in Casey drew the legal line at viability, allowing abortion to be outlawed after the point where the fetus could survive out of the womb (with the requisite health and life exceptions, of course); yesterday it destroyed that distinction as well, blurring the line between pre- and post-viability by stating that “[t]he Act appl[ies] both previability and postviability because . . . a fetus is a living organism while within the womb, whether or not it is viable outside the womb.”
Now, abortion can potentially be restricted without regard for the pregnant woman’s health or the state of fetal development. Not surprisingly, anti-choice groups are newly emboldened — and they can barely contain their glee at the prospect of proposing laws which will inevitably compromise women’s health. As anti-choice activists Leslee Unruh told the Los Angeles Times, “I’m ecstatic … It’s like someone gave me $1 million and told me, ‘Leslee, go shopping.’ That’s how I feel.” She further said that she and other anti-choice activists are already plotting the best ways to use the new ruling to curtail abortion rights around the country — “We’re brainstorming and we’re having fun,” she said.
We will undoubtedly see the outcome of that “fun” in the coming weeks. Anti-choice politicians will be presenting legislation intended to make us less like Belgium (where they enjoy one of the lowest abortion rates in the world, and where the procedure is widely available and very safe) and more like Brazil (where elective abortion is generally illegal, but the abortion rate is higher than most of Western Europe and the United States — another key difference being that almost 300,000 Brazilian women are hospitalized after clandestine abortions every year. Not all of them survive).
This latest decision is indeed a victory for the “pro-life” movement, precisely because — like many positions taken by mainstream “pro-life” groups — it will not save any fetal lives, but it will compromise women’s health, and it will punish and harm women in order to score ideological points. As anti-choice organizations propose new legislation, notice how much of it embraces tried-and-true methods of decreasing the abortion rate (birth control, access to medical care, comprehensive sexual health education) and how much of it relies on long-failed punitive measures which have been proven time and again to do little to decrease abortion, but much to make it more dangerous, often at the expense of women’s lives (criminalization, blocking access to abortion, limiting contraception access and medical care).
We know that pro-choice policies save lives, and make for healthier women, healthier families, and healthier children. We know what happens when abortion is illegal or highly restricted. We know that anti-choice forces in the United States seek to completely outlaw the procedure, turning women and doctors into criminals. We know that they have little regard for women’s lives, and almost no regard for women’s physical health. And now our own Supreme Court has given them the green light.
“We’re moving beyond putting roadblocks in front of abortions to actually prohibiting them,” said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, a national anti-abortion group based in Wichita, Kan. “This swings the door wide open.”
That is a great post, with an especially strong finish. Brava.
This is a great piece, as usual. I’m actually really surprised the court was so irresponsible in upholding this.
The comments are idiotic. You were clear that it only affects the women who won’t die giving birth and yet a commenter rails about how all the articles state that there’s no exemption for life of the mother. You know, never mind her health and future chances for reproduction.
So many f’ing idiots out there.
This is a terrific piece that excellently discusses the implications of this policy for women’s bodily autonomy and the wider political struggle over reproductive freedom. Thanks so much for writing it. And I’ve got a Stats project to put off tonight… so maybe I’ll knock heads with the HuffPos for a bit… y’know if I’m REALLY bored.
You made me cry, Jill. Thanks for crossposting into a safe(r) space.
Thank you for writing this. You explained a lot of what I knew implicitly about this case and the precedents it obliterates, but what I haven’t been able to explain coherently to friends and family who have been asking me for explanations, for lack of knowledge of the law that was upheld and other important details.
As a woman I’m beyond pissed off at the court and that’s what I’m overwhelmingly feeling at the moment, but there’s this petty part of the 1L part of me that is also deeply annoyed at the court for changing what I need to know for my upcoming Con Law exam, and for writing such a shoddy legal opinion.
Fantastic post. Clear, logical and passionate. Ahh, friggin SCrOTUS. I am so so angry!
Excellent, excellent, excellent post, Jill!
Thanks, Jill
As if I needed to type this here, I cannot believe the majority’s concept of the government’s interest in this case. As you noted, it is not in protecting fetal life. It’s more, as Lithwick pointed out on Slate, that Justice Kennedy doesn’t wanna be grossed out. To be generous, perhaps the government interest is in something like ‘the dignity of fetal life as it is terminated.’ But if you want to talk about imaginary judicial inventions, that would take the cake.
Brilliantly written. Thank you.
Rainne said it first. You made me cry, it was beautifully written. I’ve spent the past 3 weeks going the rounds with myself regarding my fertility (pill? IUD? Kids ever?), and I hate the idea that were something to go completely haywire, I have lost a choice (certainly not a first choice, but a neccessary option, in my opinon) due to an medically misguided, idealogical decision by the SCOTUS. Brava, Jill, indeed.
Excellent post, and most of the comments at HuffPo (apart from a couple of persistent anti-choicers) are pretty good, including another tale of D & X following fetal death.
One thing in the article confused me, and I wondered if it was a typo:
This seems to identify D&X as both the banned procedure and the one that is still legal. Can you clarify?
Sublime piece, Jill. I only wish the SC would read it.
Really good.
Very good post. And the comments, just eww….
Fabulous. I linked to it on my myspace, and hopefully my female cousins who see me there will read it. They’re all quite a bit younger than me, and in religious families, and I hope they get some good information from it.
Yeah, that is a typo, and I’ll email them to fix it. Dilation and evacuation is the legal procedure.
It made me cry a bit as well. It’s so clear, and the ban so clearly wrong that it is extremely depressing to see morons still defending it, still trotting out misogynistic lies to defend it.
I’m disgusted.
It has never been more clear that I, as a woman, an utterly unimportant, and disposable.
I commented over there at around 10 am, and the comment hasn’t shown up yet – though comments written around 10:50 have popped up. I don’t know HuffPo policy really well, but compared to some of the idiot troll comments they’ve let through on your post, mine was an insightful literary triumph. Don’t know what’s going on…
It has nagged at me for a long time but this decision has clarified some things for me. These decisions, anti-choice and their current gloating and so much misogyny is based on fear. The whole ‘regulate it because it makes us uncomfortable’ attitude behind this decision. Kennedy knows that he couldn’t handle what so many families go through, he knows that his life views would be stressed and fractured under the full weight of what life can bring and so he has to turn in fear and make a vile decision like this and justify it by his desire to protect women from the life he fears. He and the burbling fools who think that this will make life go away can hide their heads in the sand but this goes beyond that, they want us to suffer for their fear. They can only be comfortable when they see someone else sacrificed for their cowardice, I don’t know how people living in such gut-wrenching fear of reality can live with themselves and unfortunately, we have to deal with the side effects of their pathetic denial.
i have a hard time understanding how banning one particular procedure is considered an assault on women’s rights.
p. 30 of the court’s ruling:
they did not ban partial birth abortions themselves, they are banning a procedure, which as they go in further detail on p. 8, is especially cruel and painful for the fetus.
i won’t deny that i have a problem with partial birth abortions unless done specifically to save the mother’s life. i do not think the slippery slope eugenics fear is that irrational here.
but this supreme court ban was defining and limiting a very specific procedure (in the same way it defines and limits certain forms of capital punishment). it is not a ban on partial-birth abortions themselves.
Really a great article Jill, right on. I certainly hope everyone has made clear to their state representatives how they feel about this, it does make a difference.
Well, there’s no such thing as “partial-birth” abortion — as the HuffPo piece says, that’s a made-up non-medical term. So this doesn’t outlaw all late-term abortion, but it does outlaw so-called “partial-birth” abortion (dilation & evacuation is not “partial-birth”).
Part of the problem, though, is why is it more cruel to terminate a fetus’s like this way than in another way at the same stage of development? Because this way is grosser? It just doesn’t make much sense.
I think there’s a confusion with terminology here. “Partial-birth abortion” is not synonymous with late-term abortion. And the issue isn’t really with this single procedure being banned. If that were all that happened, it would be unfortunate, but nothing to panic about. The problem is that this obliterates decades of precedent on reproductive rights, and basically means that abortion bans on OTHER procedures don’t have to offer a health exception It opens the door to further restrictions — which will, without a doubt, be proposed and pass. So it’s not just about this procedure, it’s about the larger standard this decision sets.
I’m going to try to write another post on this and hopefully clarify some things.
Great piece. It tied a lot of the different aspects together well, especially the greater implications, which make the decision that much more frightening (beyond the stupidity and cruelty of the ban itself).
To be generous, perhaps the government interest is in something like ‘the dignity of fetal life as it is terminated.’ – Mikey
If that were the case (or the interest was in the health of the mother-to-be or even the mother-to-be not being grossed out) they’d have banned D&Es and allowed ID&Xs. The fact of the matter is that ID&Xs are icky enough surgeries that people can get grossed out by them, but you can also have cartoon pictures of cute little fetuses getting their brains sucked out by evil doctors that disgust people enough that they’ll get angry at teh evil abortionists and teh poor wimins seduced into this evil that they’ll push for a ban. OTOH, any picture of a D&E is so gross, people just look away, so you don’t get any traction besides “what are you trying to do, gross me out or win me to your side?”.
People have tried to convince me otherwise but AFAIC, that they’ve targetted ID&X first indicates how much of a bad faith political program the whole anti-choice project is (even if there are many bona-fide pro-life people out there) … and that people have fallen into “I’m pro-choice but ‘partial birth abortion’ goes to far” just shows how muddled the so-called consensus on abortion really is and why it and popularly elected institutions cannot be trusted to preserve abortion rights.
Great job Jill! I think a lot of people just can’t get past their discomfort with the procedure, a discomfort I think a lot of people have. That being said, discomfort with a procedure is not, not, not a reason to ban it. Period. I’ve been in a situation where the doctor is sitting across from you telling you the child that you are carrying cannot survive and to say it’s horrifyingly scary is an understatement. I was lucky at the time to live in a state with liberal abortion laws, which allowed me to take as much time as I needed to make the decision that was right for me, but now the federal government is taking a safe option away from women who are already dealing with some of the worst news a pregnant woman can get. I did the labor and delivery option and I know how hard it is on your body and your emotional health. It involved three days in the hospital, laminaria insertion, two seperate doses of a vaginal cervidil suppository, cytotec by mouth and two days hooked up to a pitocin drip at double the recommended doses in order to get labor to start and maintain itself. My body was wracked with contractions that would stop and start and stop and start, I threw up several times and the amount of morphine they gave me to dull the pain brought on severe hallucinations. Although the nurses tried to keep us as isolated as possible, two hours after my son died, I heard the woman in the next room give birth to her child and I heard the baby cry and I wanted to die, right there on the spot. It was the right choice for me at the time, but I can’t imagine forcing someone to go through that at the risk of their health or fertility simply because people are grossed out at the procedure of intact D&X. I was only 24 and in good health with no major complications, a lot of women aren’t as lucky.
That is totally fair but most of these procedures are being done because the mother’s life is already at risk. What they are debating is the squickiness of medical procedures (all well known for their general squickiness) and how damaged the mother will be afterwards. Doctors usually make these decisions based on the individual situations and now the Supreme Court is saying that the State can limit a doctor’s choice of procedure because ‘we find it eeew!’. Mother’s lives are still going to be saved, the question is how many will be maimed in the process.
Beautiful piece, Jill! It makes me feel better to realize that there are people like you in the world. Thank you!
Julie: OT but thanks for sharing your story (again) here. If only people knew what women like you had to go through, maybe they’d have an ounce of compassion or the decency to let women make their own decisions about these most difficult decisions…then again, maybe not. I think many are just impervious to the facts so they can paint their picture of “immoral women” who must be stopped…
How does the federal government get away with prohibiting a specific abortion procedure? We all learned the Constitution does not grant the federal government any general police power. This was most recently reinforced in Morrison, when the federal Violence Against Women Act was struck down. Do crippled fetuses somehow have a nexus with interstate commerce? Or does the government believe abortion deprives a citizen of his civil rights? How ironic that the Supremes struck down a law that helped women, and upheld a law that hurts them.
If fetuses are now people, can a pregnant woman take a pre-birth tax exemption for them? Can she ride in the carpool lane by herself? How does she determine their non-birthday?
This whole thing is nonsense. We need a Supremer Court to review the decisions of this one.
Brilliant.
In my opinion, this is another thing that is scary about this. Where is that line between the “life” and “health” of the mother. I don’t know enough about the actual medical conditions but I can easily imagine a situation where the birth is likely to cause harm to the mother, but in a rare percentage of cases, death can result. So does a doctor perform a procedure that leaves her open to criminal prosecution, or does she not do the procedure and leave herself open to civil liability in case the mother dies?
Thanks for posting your article here as I am not in the mood for their tripe as this decision really hits close to home. I wish I could say more, but the words just aren’t there.
That’s certainly the question, innit? Kind of puts the lie to all those people who are willing to sacrifice Roe because it will “just” result in “returning the issue to the states” and maybe it will be “energizing” for the Dems.
Not anymore, it won’t. We now have a federal abortion ban.
Commerce clause can apply to healthcare-related issues.
Exactly, DDay!
Someone please tell me, how does *any* exception to an abortion ban work? If you’re raped, they can just deny that you were (and call you a slut to sweeten the pot). Bill Napoli, anyone? Same with this “distinction” between life and health.
It seems like the antis can throw out these bans and say “oh look, there are *exceptions*, we’re throwing you a bone, so shut up!” when in fact the effect is to just completely ban all abortions, and get doctors scared of coming within 2 feet of a vagina.
Oh jeez, I just realized: the last line is not meant to be read that way.
Women will die, and lose their fertility, and in other ways be damaged, and then we will have our “poster children,” and won’t that be fun?
/sarcasm
Nicely, done, Jill … with more depth than what I wrote on Wednesday. I, too, was struck by Ginsburg’s remarks and the amazingly pandering language — not just towards women, but also towards the surgeons.
you’re right jill i was confusing terms here.
i just don’t exactly understand how this procedure is considered a partial-abortion ban, when doctors can still kill the fetus inside the mother.
can someone please clarify?
thank you
[...] ed, as is the usual case when a late term abortion is done. I had a great time reading the post and comments over [...]
Thank you, for writing this. I’ve been reading silently for a long time now, but wanted to write in because this issue is essential. I’ve posted the link to my facebook page.
just don’t exactly understand how this procedure is considered a partial-abortion ban, when doctors can still kill the fetus inside the mother.
can someone please clarify?
That’s part of the larger problem; they seem to be fairly clear in intent that the IDX is the procedure they’re talking about, but the language is ambiguous enough that it might refer to the other procedures as well. In that case, doctors would be afraid to do any of them for fear of prosecution, and the only means of getting a dead/dying fetus out would be a c-section or forced labor, both of which can be deadly or cause permanent damage to the pregnant woman.
Because the procedure used is often the best choice to preserve the woman’s fertility so she can try to have another child. Unless you think a woman needs to be punished for having a fetus with birth defects so severe that it cannot survive to be born, and that her punishment should be that she can never have another child?
I think Hawise is on to something up above: the people who pushed for this law have never had this happen to themselves or one of their family members, and they don’t have enough empathy to imagine how horrible it is for a woman to find out that her planned and wanted pregnancy has gone wrong.
I’d say that it’s gonna take having a prominent Republican’s daughter requiring this procedure, but even that won’t change anything since they’re firmly the party of, “One law for me, one law for thee.” She’d get the “banned” procedure and everyone would look the other way while they cracked down hard on anyone else who dared preserve their fertility.
i don’t really have a stand either way on this issue yet.
but i will say that this procedure is far from just being “gross”. here’s the description within the opinion:
“‘Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms—everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus. . . .”‘The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall. “‘The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. . . . “‘He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.’
p. 8
Actually the rich’ll do what they did back before Roe: They’ll either go to a state that does still offer the procedure ( which is unlikely because as jill mentions, one effect of this ban is that even less doctors will be trained to do it – so for once even the rich won’t be able to get american doctors to do it no matter how much money they throw at the problem), or they’ll fuck off to the Abortion Capital of the anglophonic world: London (which they also used to do before roe, and irish women who can afford the trip still do) and get the procedure there.
Privelage means private law, but no WASP ever flaunted the ban completely, though there’s also never been a law against acquiring an abortion in another country – a loophole that only allows those able to travel outside the cuntry to get access to neccesary medical procedures who’s illegality helps nobody. Which is a very interesting loop hole considering most pregnant women in america right now aren’t able to afford to travel interstate to get the treatment they need.
Though what would be absolutely fucked up is if the aborting WASPs end up going to mexico for their abortions – mexico’s poor come here to be exploited, and our rich go there to be aborted, it’s like the circle of life, but insane(r).
Oh, I thought women’s uterii were considered to be Federal Lands or something.
At least, that’s what all those public works guys told me, and why would they lie?
[...] nful and frustrating week, between the VT shooting and all the politicizing that followed, the Supreme Court decis [...]
I thought it was lovely. I shared it with my pro-life Catholic friend so that maybe she’s see how wrong she is.
i dont understand how the language is unclear.
it seems like the laws were unclear before, but the SC just defined it very firmly now.
p.s. why do all my comments require moderation?
Spot on. Of course the guys know. All we need is a Bureau of Women’s Affairs and we’ll be complete.
Each and every excrutiating result of this horrendous reactionary raping of women’s lives must be documented and publicized. I can only hope Scalia et al chokes on a large, dead gnocchi and he is made to eject it from his throat himself and for lack of success, finds himself unable to continue his courtly duties.
It’s unclear because they’re using a non-medical term coined by anti-abortion activists, which does not describe any particular procedure. The best match is IDX, but that’s just guesswork.
The Supreme Court has defined nothing — the law, and the decision, still doesn’t refer to anything known to medical science.
The ways of the spam filter are mysterious, even to your blog hosts. Acceptance is the path to enlightenment.
Sigh.
My one hope is that this law proves unenforceable.
What’s going to happen? The doctor determines that a patient needs an abortion. The doctor determines that the appropriate procedure is IDX. The doctor performs an IDX instead of a more dangerous procedure. Who is going to complain? For anyone but the mother, the complaint couldn’t be followed up on, since medical records are confidential. And a woman is unlikely to complain that a doctor performed a less-invasive, less-dangerous procedure that allows her to have future children.
This doesn’t deal with the legal problem of having protections such as the the “health of the mother” exception disappear, but it may provide an out.
The catch, I think, is going to be at the level of the insurance companies. Medical care has to be reported to them in order to be covered.
But the insurance companies may well have their own incentive for looking the other way. A safe abortion will cost them less than an abortion that carries greater risk. (And definitely less than a normal birth, or having another person added to a flat-rate family plan.) They may choose not to ask questions about the type of abortion performed, rather than having to pay for the after-care of the legal procedures gone wrong.
It may prove useful to increase support for legislation that protects the privacy of patients. That is going to be the space in which women can get appropriate care, in the future. And since patient privacy is an issue for men as well as women, it may slip past the misogynists.
It also might help if we got the fucking ERA through.
Forgive me, but I am very weak on law. What does this ban mean in terms of states’ rights? Does it mean a state now has the right to ban “partial birth” abortions? Or do states already have that right and now it is completely illegal to perform a “partial birth” abortion in any state?
Actually, I am ashamed I’m this ignorant, but along with the states’ rights idea, can individual states vote to specifically allow these kinds of abortions? (I’m thinking of Oregon and their assisted-suicide bill, which ran counter to federal law.) Does federal law trump state law, or just exist in the absence of alternative state law?
car- it will all come down to the federal prosecutors and their decisions on whether or not to bring such a case to trial. That is why it is so important to get this current group of clowns out before they take down what is left of the Justice system.
The doctor performs an IDX instead of a more dangerous procedure. Who is going to complain?
Except the anti-choicers are already pushing to get access to the confidential medical records of women who abort, using hte enforcement of the parental consent laws with some good old fashion pedophilia accusations as the excuse for that.
This ban will empower anti-choicers to expand that, and push for access to the medical records of all women rather than just juveniles.
It’s an evil pyramid – once you notice the slippery slope, the ziggarat is almost finished.
p.s. why do all my comments require moderation?
Your past membership in socialist organisations probably – I think the feministe’s automod is actually the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy.
It’s also the same system that the CIA and FBI use to pick which groups they should monitor – lest they waste time monitoring extremist religious or nationalist groups instead of keeping an eye on those subversive black communist lesbian vegans.
Are the “US out of my uterUS” bumperstickers still available?
R. Mi was me sorry, got distracted midway through typing the name out.
irish women who can afford the trip
R MIldred, see www,ryanair.com
There are relatively few Irish women who are prevented from getting abortions by our hideous and hypocritical laws. Judging from Jill’s posts on hosting women who come to NYC for abortions, the issues facing many US women who want abortions are much more severe. For infrastructure reasons, mainly– Ireland is *tiny*– and also because there are stronger legal guarantees of time off work etc.
It’s a minor thing, but it niggles me whenever this comes up, for a couple of reasons, some less good than others.
1) Embarrassment. This country really isn’t the backward priest-ridden hellhole it used to be. However, as long as I am a citizen of a country with such retrograde laws on its books, I guess I deserve to be embarrassed.
2) Making a distinction between legal availability of abortion and the practical availability of abortion is incredibly important, and failing to make this distinction plays into the hands of the forces of darkness– see every thread ever on this particular decision for examples, and all the crap about how the procedure’s still legal if the woman’s life is in danger, not that that ever happens ANYWAY, with no acknowledgement from them about how that exception plays out (or fails to) on a practical level.
3) Ireland has been undergoing an economic boom since the 90′s. This economic boom has, whether coincidentally or not (not!) correlated with a massive liberalisation of social attitudes. I can’t actually prove it, but I rather doubt that this boom could have happened in a country where the abortion ban was actually effective. See here for some scanty evidence supporting that hunch:
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9038760
(my logic is that the ban would prevent many women from controlling their lives sufficiently to perform effectively in the workforce)
Anyway, whether it was coincidence or not, Irish people have a pretty strong link in their heads between “priest-ridden hellhole” and “sky high unemployment +mass emigration”
I am getting the optimistic impression that enduring the Bush Administration is causing many Americans to make a similar mental link between social conservatism and economic struggles, (though obviously y’all are a LONG way off economically from being eighties Ireland, or even Ireland now.)
Um, anyway, so I think overstating the Irish problem is sort of unhelpful, in that it would be a good thing for that kind of link to establish itself more firmly in people’s heads.
(I do sometimes wonder how the arguments about abortion in the US apply to the Irish situation, but in a country where nearly everyone was educated by Catholics, there is this fear that pushing for sane abortion laws might resuscitate the right wing– actually, might be the only conceivable way of doing so. And this factor of the practical harm done to women being smaller makes people less willing to risk the fight.)
There are relatively few Irish women who are prevented from getting abortions by our hideous and hypocritical laws.
damn, yes, you’re right, my sense of scale is thrown off when I hear about people going from one country to another – in theory I’m thinking of countries, so i’m thinking of say a canada/america or mexico/america trip, when in reality it’s probably more like travelling between boroughs of NY.
And also my knowledge of Ireland is dvided between research on the occupation of Northern Ireland and watching Father Ted – two extremes that aren’t exactly helping me there.
I lived in Ireland for many years, and recently went back to visit. No, it’s not the “priest-ridden hellhole” it used to be. But women in rural areas (I’m thinking especially of rural areas in Connemara) still have a difficult time accessing family planning services. It’s not terribly expensive to to travel to the UK, especially if you’re middle class, but it’s not that cheap either. Also, women from rural areas have enough trouble getting to big cities if they don’t own a car (I remember very few women owning cars in rural Connemara. Cars were almost always owned by the “man of the house”) nevermind out of the country and back again.
Response to Jill Filipovic’s HuffPo article
Jill Filipovic is a vapid feminist whose lifelong ambition is to export abortion to South America. I posted the following in response to her HuffPo article…
True, GG, but I don’t think that actually has a huge amount to do with the abortion laws. Underprovision of health services to Connemara and social isolation of rural women seem to be the more pertinent problems there. I don’t think that changing the abortion laws would fix that.
What I mean is, if you’re in the kind of desperate situation where you can’t put your hands on a few hundred euros and an Internet connection, and travel two hours to a town with an airport, even for a medical emergency, then it’s quite possible that even legal availability of abortion inside the country wouldn’t be enough to help you get one. It would be bound to help some women, at the margins, but I can’t see that number being large. Unless it was free as well as legal, of course.
A cartoon on the decision:
http://blogs.courant.com/bob_englehart/2007/04/post_1.html#more